Rasputin's Shadow

51

A nerve agent?” Aparo asked. “You serious?”

My thoughts were cartwheeling ahead with it. “Think about it. Sokolov, or whatever his real name is-he’s a scientist. A Russian scientist. We know he’s very bright. Maybe he came up with something that can turn people aggressive. Something airborne that can set off their most primal instincts. Something he didn’t want anyone to know about.”

“A gas that turns people aggressive?” Aparo repeated, looking distinctly unconvinced. “You have the gall to say that with a straight face after blowing off my theory about alternative fuel?”

“I don’t know if it’s a gas or a spray or what, but maybe it’s some kind of drug,” I countered. “One that can go airborne. Like inhaling secondhand smoke. The way pot has an effect on the brain. Maybe this is something like that. The opposite of Prozac. Instead of calming you down, it makes you real angry. Angry and paranoid. So you lash out at the merest provocation. Everything feels like a threat.”

I felt a rush of energy. The more I thought about it, the less outlandish it seemed. A nerve gas would go a long way to explaining why the crowd at Lolita went from party animals to bloodthirsty savages and back within a matter of minutes.

“We’ve got to run tox tests on the Lolita crowd,” I said.

Aparo turned serious. “Hang on a sec, that doesn’t stack up. What about the docks?”

“What about them?”

“Sokolov went out of his way to get the van and take it to the docks when he and Jonny went to get Daphne back,” Aparo said. “Why take the van all the way there but not hand it over in exchange for her? That had to be the deal, right?”

“Maybe that was the plan,” I agreed. “Maybe Ivan wanted the van all along, but maybe something went wrong and he got Sokolov instead.”

Something about that felt wrong, but I still thought the diffuser/nerve-agent idea merited a closer look.

“So how come Jonny and his buddy weren’t affected by it out at Lolita?” Aparo added. “Gas masks?”

“Maybe,” I said. I mulled it over some more, then asked, “What do you think?”

“Not to take anything away from my brilliant alternative-fuel theory-but, could be. And if that’s the case-shit, we’ve got to get it back.”

“We’ve got to get him back too. He designed it.”

Aparo nodded as he sped up. “Let’s see what we find at the garage.”

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, we turned into the rundown industrial park and pulled up by the small management office just inside its rusted gates. No one was there. We got back in the car and drove in until we found the unit that was the registered address for Sokolov’s van. I wasn’t sure what I expected, but it wasn’t the small lock-up garage it turned out to be.

We had two padlocks to get past, and they proved tricky, but not insurmountable, with Aparo besting me by half a minute or so. We pushed up the roller door about an inch, and while Aparo held it open, I crouched down and had a look to make sure it wasn’t booby-trapped. I didn’t really expect it to be, and I didn’t see anything suggesting it was.

We pulled it open.

The garage was empty. It was of a decent size, big enough to store the van, with about four feet to spare all around. I hit the lights. It was clean and tidy. No big oil stains on the concrete floor, no odds and ends left to rot there for years. There wasn’t much in it, aside from one shelf hanging at shoulder level all the way down the left-hand wall. It had a couple of cardboard boxes stored on it.

We took them down and opened them up.

They had all kinds of electronic parts in them. Wires, cables, switches, rolls of flat copper-colored metal in different gauges, small plastic boxes filled with miniature circuits and connectors, and a collection of square metal tubes of different lengths and widths-some hollow and some filled with what looked like conducting material. There was also what looked like an old pair of jeweler’s magnifying glasses.

They weren’t car parts, that much I knew. Beyond that, I had no idea what they were or what they could be used for, but I sure as hell wanted to find out. I took several photos of them with my phone and e-mailed them to our in-house computer analysis and response team. It wasn’t necessarily the specialty of the guys at CART, but I knew that their geekiness extended beyond digital data, and if they didn’t know what these things were, I was sure they knew who to ask.

I had a sinking feeling about what they would tell us.

I was e-mailing the last of them when I got a call from an unidentified number. I snatched my phone off the desk, knowing it had to be the pancake-loving hacker I had tasked with my private dirty deed.

“Gimme a sec,” I told Aparo as I stepped away to take the call.

“Konnichiwa,” Kurt’s voice echoed. “You sitting down, boss? I have news.” He paused for effect, then proudly announced, “Target acquired.”

“I’m listening,” I said evenly, not wanting to encourage him too much.

He sounded excited. “So I got into the CCTV cam of the cash point, and I found our guy pulling out last week’s cash. Then he kind of glances around like he’s making sure no one’s watching before he walks off.”

“Maybe he’s just making sure no one’s waiting to mug him.”

“Maybe. But no. It gets better. I found a personal credit card of his with no paper trail. Statements and everything else only comes through to him by e-mail. And not his main Gmail account. I looked through the last three months’ worth of statements and you could say the card use doesn’t really fit that of a married guy with two kids. There are multiple charges to trivial-sounding businesses, but when you dig into who they are, they’re billing names for a lingerie shop called Sylene, a chocolate place called Cocova, and a flower shop called Gilding the Lily. They’re all down in the DC area. Plus he had a single charge of over three hundred dollars to something called L’Escapade. It’s an upmarket sex shop on U Street. Four and a half stars across the board.”

“So maybe he loves his wife. Maybe they’re meeting away from the house to share some private time. Or trying to spice things up with some role-playing.”

He snorted. “You talking from experience?”

I dropped my tone. “Careful, Kurt. Let’s remember the parameters of our relationship.”

He went silent, and I could sense all kinds of pressure valves popping inside his fragile physique.

“I’m kidding,” I told him. “Go on.”

“Well, he has another credit card, the one he shares with his wife. In the last month he’s charged all kinds of stuff on it. Car repairs, a plumbing contractor, his son’s braces, horse-riding lessons for his daughter. Personally I prefer my mount mammoth-shaped and a hundred percent digital. Less chance of real-world injury.”

“Focus, Kurt.”

“Yeah, sorry. My point is, he would have used that card if it was on the up and up. But he’s not. He’s using it cause it’s not with the wife. And here’s the good news. The card was used to guarantee a hotel booking for tonight.”

My skin bristled. “Cash point Thursday.”

“Exactly. And his disciplinary warnings were for arriving late to work on three Fridays in the last couple of months. You know anyone who arrives late at work so he can hang out longer with his wife?”

I wasn’t about to argue with someone whose deep insights into married life were gleaned while living with his mother. “So he books the hotel with the card, but pays the bill in cash.”

“And the authorization for the guarantee to hold the room is wiped clean. It never shows up on a statement. And you want the clincher?”

“Boggle me.”

“The hotel’s right next to the ATM he uses.”

Kurt had come through for me, massively-pun wholeheartedly intended.

I said, “He might be seeing her tonight.”

“I’ll bet he is. Remember, that’s when his wife has her weekly yoga class. Seven till nine. Meanwhile her husband’s putting a hundred dollars’ worth of edible lubricant to good use.” He chuckled. “And there I was, thinking field agents had all the fun.”

This sounded more than promising. “Okay. I need the hotel’s details and a photo of Kirby.”

“Done. And I’ll get into his alibi. Give you even more leverage.”

“Great.”

“He’s lucky he managed to snag a room tonight. The whole town’s booked solid.”

Which was curious. “Why?”

“The White House Correspondents Dinner. It’s tomorrow night. It’s like the Oscars these days. Huge.”

I wondered if it would make my getting a flight down there more difficult. “Okay. What time does he usually arrive?”

“I went through the hotel’s card issuing records. I found Kirby checking in last week and three weeks ago. Always between seven forty-five and eight.”

I glanced at my watch. It was almost noon. Tricky-but doable. Very doable.

I told Kurt, “Nice work, man. Seriously. You’d make a good cop.”

He chuckled. “With this body? I think not. Now, I’ve got a five-way Halo game starting in ten, so I’ll bid you sayonara.”

The line went dead, leaving me to wonder about how I was going to make it down to DC and back undetected given everything else that was going on, and questioning whether cheating on one’s wife would give me enough moral grounds for blackmail.

Then I remembered what they’d done to Alex, and any misgivings I was feeling were smothered into submission.

“Everything okay?” Aparo asked, giving me a curious look.

“Just peachy,” I told him.

I was going to need his help with this, but I wasn’t going to mention it just yet. Everything was moving so fast that my plans could change at any moment.

I just hoped they wouldn’t change enough that I wouldn’t be able to meet our wandering lothario in a few hours.